


A Spinner's Guide To Eternity

by contraryGreymalkin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 09:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contraryGreymalkin/pseuds/contraryGreymalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you really know how to find it, the light is everywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Spinner's Guide To Eternity

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt:  
> "The thing's hollow -- it goes on forever -- and -- oh my God! -- it's full of stars!" - David Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Time is not supposed to go on forever. Time is a property of universes, one they resort to in order to stop everything happening at once, to allow the smaller beings contained within to process the vastness of reality in small, simply-digested slices. And universes, even ones as big and bright as yours, die.

The Furthest Ring is not a place for smaller beings. If time has an end here, you've never found it, though you once traced as far back as a (local) millennium before the arrival of the Green Sun, and forward to... well. Sometimes the timelines fray, and you don't stay in those places. Sometimes the frayed ends catch you, and you leave a little of yourself behind, but only a little. You're immortal, you have Time to spare, and you dance away so much of it that sometimes you forget you didn't always.

That's the only thing that worries you. That's when you go back to Rose (except for those times when her wandering dream projection finds you in the dark), and let her lead you down into the meteor, basking in her light. She's small too, tiny compared to the void and its denizens, its terrors and its wonders, but she has room for you. She grounds you.

She keeps you from wandering off into the dark and never coming back.

 

Paradoxically, if you really know how to find it, the light is everywhere.

When you go up onto the roof, you close your eyes and look out. With them open, all you would see is the dark, hollow void, the shadows of the horrorterrors in the lab's weak light, sometimes the shimmer of an approaching dreambubble (though sometimes you go up to watch those pass too, and you're rarely disappointed by the show).

But with your eyes closed, you See. Sometimes the meteor passes through the tracks of dead sessions, cold incipispheres with their games long since ended, but where the light of the players' luck remains, warm and bright. Sometimes you pass places where Skaia is yet to bloom, skimming close to tangled skeins of fortune yet to be touched by needles, and you send out your hopes, such as you can, to the players yet to be born. Sometimes you only cross the distant light-cones of far-off Skaias, bent into invisibility by the void's weird geometries, but with possibilities brighter than Sirius to your Sight.

Sometimes it frightens you. Sometimes it's all too bright to bear, too big, too important, too _meaningful_ , and you want to throw yourself out into it, open your mind again to a passing Noble, let them understand everything _for_ you, so you don't have to know, to see -

That's always when she comes, the flutter of her scarlet wings reminding you to open your eyes so you can see her blinding smile. You take her hand, lead her into the meteor as though you could keep her, and she does stay, for a while, lets you brush her hair and groom her wings while you laugh together about the latest stupid thing Dave did to Karkat and she tells you tales that really ought to have come out of Indiana Jones and the Sunken City of R'lyeh. She sings you to sleep, and inevitably you wake to find her gone.

One day, you know, you'll find her still here. You'll go through the door together, into something new, and you'll never let go of her hand.

But for now, this will suffice. The void is a paradox full of stars, and Aradia Megido is the brightest.


End file.
